Why fiction can be more powerful than nonfiction when we need to understand social issues

Facts matter. We need historians, journalists, researchers, documentaries, investigative reporting, firsthand testimony, and all the other forms of nonfiction that help us understand what actually happened in the world. Facts are essential. Without them, we cannot distinguish history from mythology, evidence from propaganda, or reality from the stories people tell themselves. But sometimes, facts aren’t enough.

Sometimes we can know a fact without really understanding it. We can know that human beings were enslaved. We can know that people were displaced from their homes. We can know that women living under oppressive governments lose rights and opportunities. We can know that war changes ordinary people’s lives. We can know that trauma can be passed from one generation to another. And yet we can still struggle to understand what any of those things actually mean to the people experiencing them. That is where fiction can do something extraordinary.

A novel can take a historical or social issue that feels impossibly large and give it a face. It can turn statistics into a mother, a daughter, a grandmother, a soldier, a refugee, or a child. It can put us inside a home before someone loses it and allow us to experience the terror of watching that home disappear.

Recent novels like Deena Helm’s Our Cut of Salt and Nadia Hashimi’s City of Widows have reminded me of just how powerful fiction can be when it tackles social issues. Both novels deal with enormous historical and political realities, but neither asks us to understand those realities as abstract concepts. Instead, they make us live alongside people who are experiencing them. And that matters because the stories we read today may become part of the history people tell tomorrow. Facts tell us what happened. Stories show us what it felt like.

One of the limitations of nonfiction is not actually a flaw in nonfiction at all. Nonfiction has an obligation to tell us what is true. A historian cannot simply invent a character who represents an entire population. A journalist cannot manufacture a scene because it would make a story more emotionally compelling. A researcher cannot fill in the gaps in the historical record with whatever details would create the most satisfying narrative.

Fiction doesn’t have those limitations. A novelist can take the documented realities of a historical period and construct individual lives around them. The characters may be fictional, but the emotional circumstances surrounding them can be grounded in historical truth. That distinction is important.

When we read Our Cut of Salt, we aren’t reading a history of the Nakba. Deena Helm isn’t asking us to treat her fictional characters as historical evidence. Instead, she uses fiction to imagine what displacement, loss, cultural erasure, and generational trauma might look and feel like within one family. The result is very different from reading a list of facts about how many people were displaced or how many homes were abandoned. Statistics can tell us the scale of a catastrophe. A story can make us care about one house. And once we care about one house, the numbers don’t feel quite so abstract anymore.

This is one reason Our Cut of Salt works so well as a novel about a social and historical issue. At its center is a house. Nuhad’s family has lived in their home in Haifa for generations. It is not merely real estate. It contains their memories, their childhoods, their relationships, and their understanding of who they are. Then they lose it. Helm turns that loss into a supernatural haunting. The house remembers the people who lived there. It waits for them to return. It reacts violently to those it sees as intruders.

That is a fantastic horror premise, but it is also an extraordinarily effective way of making displacement tangible. We can read about forced displacement in a history book and understand intellectually that people lost their homes. But what does it mean to lose a home? It means leaving behind the room where you slept as a child. It means leaving behind the place where your family celebrated holidays. It means losing the view from the window that you have seen your entire life. It means knowing where every floorboard creaks and every door sticks and then suddenly being somewhere else, where none of those things belong to you. It means having an entire landscape inside your memory that you can no longer inhabit.

Our Cut of Salt turns that abstract concept into something we can emotionally experience. And then it adds another layer: the home itself remembers. The house becomes a physical manifestation of the idea that history doesn’t disappear simply because the people who experienced it are gone.

There is another important difference between reading facts about a social issue and encountering that issue through fiction. Facts can tell us what happened. Fiction asks us to spend time with someone who experienced it. That distinction can be particularly important when we are encountering people whose experiences are far removed from our own. When I read Our Cut of Salt, I wasn’t simply learning that Palestinians experienced displacement during the Nakba. I was following a fictional Palestinian family whose entire understanding of home was shaped by that loss.

When I read City of Widows, I didn’t simply learn about the restrictions placed on Afghan women under the Taliban. I followed women whose lives, relationships, choices, and futures were shaped by those restrictions. Hashimi’s novel is particularly effective because it refuses to reduce Afghan women to a single category of victimhood. In my review of City of Widows, I wrote about how the novel presents women as soldiers, journalists, mothers, daughters, survivors, and leaders rather than simply as victims. That distinction is important.

When we encounter people only through statistics or political rhetoric, it becomes easy to turn them into categories. Refugees. Afghan women. Palestinians. Immigrants. War victims. Political prisoners. Once someone becomes a category, it becomes easier to stop seeing them as an individual human being. Fiction fights that tendency by making us spend hundreds of pages with a person. We learn what she wants, what scares her, who she loves, and what she remembers. We watch her make choices and make mistakes. We watch her survive things we hope we will never have to experience. And somewhere along the way, the category becomes a person.

Fiction can create empathy because it creates proximity. There is research suggesting that this emotional immersion can matter to an individual person’s understanding of an issue. Studies of narrative transportation—the process of becoming absorbed in a story—have found relationships between being transported into fiction and increased empathy, with one experimental study finding that highly transported fiction readers showed increases in empathy that weren’t found in its nonfiction control condition.

That doesn’t mean fiction magically makes everyone more empathetic. It doesn’t. We have all read books without becoming better people, and fiction can reinforce stereotypes just as easily as it can challenge them. But when a story succeeds in transporting us into another person’s experience, something important can happen: distance decreases. We temporarily inhabit a world that isn’t ours and see through someone else’s eyes. We experience the consequences of decisions made by people with power over that character’s life. And even though we know the story is fictional, our emotional response can still be real.

That is one of fiction’s great strengths when it comes to social issues. It doesn’t require us to agree with a character. It doesn’t even require us to like them. It simply asks us to spend enough time with them that their humanity becomes difficult to ignore.

Nadia Hashimi’s City of Widows is an excellent example of this. The novel covers decades of Afghan history and moves between different periods, including the years of American occupation and the Taliban’s return to power in 2021. But Hashimi doesn’t turn the novel into a history lesson. Instead, she uses the lives of women like Marjan and Hawa to show what those political changes mean on the ground. That distinction is crucial.

We know the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan in 2021. We know the American withdrawal happened. We know Afghan women lost rights and opportunities under Taliban rule. We can read those statements in a newspaper and understand them perfectly well. But City of Widows makes us wait with Marjan at the airport. It makes us worry about Hawa. It makes us understand the choices women must make when the political structures surrounding them change overnight. It shows us that oppression isn’t experienced as a political theory. It is experienced when someone tells you that you can no longer go to school. Or work. Or travel. Or leave the house without permission. It is experienced when a mother has to make an impossible choice about her child because the economic and social structures around her have left her with no good options. Those details are what make the larger history comprehensible. The novel doesn’t replace the history. It gives the history a human scale.

One of the things I particularly appreciate about City of Widows is that Hashimi doesn’t create an uncomplicated argument in which one political system is entirely good and another is entirely evil. The novel recognizes that women’s lives were constrained in different ways even before the Taliban returned to power. During the period of American occupation, women’s opportunities could depend heavily on their families, communities, education, and circumstances. Under Taliban rule, many restrictions become state-imposed rather than simply family or community expectations. That complexity is important because social issues rarely fit neatly into a headline.

Fiction has room for contradictions. A character can be both privileged and oppressed. A person can benefit from one system while being harmed by another. A family can love someone while simultaneously limiting her freedom. A society can believe itself to be just while treating some of its members unjustly. Those contradictions are often where the truth lives. And because fiction gives us characters rather than arguments, we can encounter those contradictions without necessarily being told what conclusion we’re supposed to draw.

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This idea takes me back to a post I wrote earlier this year about Lily Brooks-Dalton’s Ruins. In that post, I wrote about the stories civilizations tell themselves and how those stories become a kind of cultural infrastructure. In Ruins, history survives through generations of retelling, and what the society accepts as truth is shaped by the narratives that have been preserved. The question that stayed with me was simple: Who gets to tell the story? Because the answer to that question affects what becomes history.

Every civilization creates an official version of itself. It creates founding myths. It creates heroes and villains. It decides which events deserve to be remembered and which can be allowed to disappear. It creates explanations for why its borders exist, why its institutions are structured the way they are, and why the people who hold power deserve to hold it. The stories don’t have to be deliberately false to have this effect. They simply have to leave something out.

As I wrote in that earlier essay, stories simplify. They smooth over contradictions and can quietly remove perspectives that don’t fit the larger narrative. And what disappears can become invisible. That is where fiction becomes particularly important. The stories we read today become the history of tomorrow. We often think of historical fiction as something that looks backward. But contemporary fiction is also looking forward.

The novels being written today will eventually become artifacts of our time. Future readers will use them to understand not only what happened, but what people in our era believed was worth writing about—and reading. That doesn’t mean they will read Our Cut of Salt and conclude that it is a definitive history of Palestine. They shouldn’t. But they may read it and understand that Palestinian displacement was not an abstract political issue to everyone living through its consequences. They may understand that people experienced the loss of home as grief, anger, confusion, fear, and inherited trauma.

They may read City of Widows and understand that the story of Afghanistan was not simply the story of governments, military campaigns, and political transitions. It was also the story of women trying to raise children, build careers, protect their families, escape violence, and preserve their dignity. That matters. Because the historical record is never just the collection of facts that survive. It is also the collection of perspectives that survive.

Who gets remembered? This is where I think fiction can sometimes accomplish something that nonfiction struggles to accomplish. A historian might tell us that thousands of people were displaced. A novelist can tell us about one girl who left behind her bedroom. A journalist might report that women lost the right to work. A novelist can show us a woman standing in front of the door of the place where she used to work, knowing she cannot go inside. A researcher might document generational trauma. A novelist can show us a grandmother whose unresolved trauma shapes the way she raises her daughter, who then passes those wounds to her own child.

Again, this isn’t an argument against nonfiction. We need the historian. We need the journalist. We need the researcher. Without them, fiction risks becoming untethered from reality. But we also need the novelist. We need the person willing to ask: What did this feel like? What did this look like from inside someone’s home? What did this do to a family? What did the child who survived it become? What does the next generation inherit? Those are questions that facts alone cannot always answer.

There is another reason this matters. For much of history, powerful people have had disproportionate control over the stories that survive. Governments write official histories. Victors write accounts of wars. Colonial powers describe the people they colonized. Political movements create their own heroic narratives. And ordinary people often have very little control over how their experiences are remembered. Fiction can challenge that.

A novelist can take a perspective that has been ignored and put it at the center of the story. That is what makes a novel like Our Cut of Salt meaningful to me. It isn’t simply a story about a haunted house in Haifa. It is a story in which Palestinian characters’ experiences are central. Their home matters. Their history matters. Their memories matter. Their displacement matters. The novel asks readers who may not have encountered these experiences before to spend time inside them. That doesn’t make the novel historical evidence. It makes it a cultural artifact. And cultural artifacts matter because they influence which stories get carried forward.

We are writing tomorrow’s history right now. This is perhaps the part of the argument that matters most to me. We tend to think of history as something that already happened. But history is also something we are constantly creating. Every time a story is written, published, taught, adapted, discussed, recommended, banned, forgotten, or preserved, we are making decisions about what future generations will have available to them. That is the idea at the heart of Ruins.

Civilizations survive through stories. Over time, stories become history. History becomes identity. Identity becomes structure. And those structures are not neutral. The books we read today are part of that process. A hundred years from now, someone may look back at the fiction of 2026 and try to understand what mattered to us. They may not have access to every social media post. They may not read every newspaper article. They certainly won’t remember every political speech. But they may read our novels. They may read the stories we chose to tell about war, migration, racism, gender, poverty, technology, climate change, political oppression, religion, family, and identity. And they may ask what those stories tell them about us.

Who did we center? Who did we ignore? Who did we portray as dangerous? Who did we portray as sympathetic? Whose suffering did we consider worthy of a story? Whose suffering did we leave at the margins? Those choices matter.

There is a danger in all of this, though. If fiction has the power to shape how we understand social issues, it also has the power to distort them. A novel can perpetuate stereotypes. It can romanticize oppression. It can reduce complicated cultures to a handful of familiar tropes. It can tell a compelling story that is historically inaccurate and leave readers with a completely false impression of the world it depicts. That is why fiction should not replace nonfiction. It should work alongside it. Read the novel. Then read the history. Read the memoir. Read the journalism. Read voices from the people whose lives are being represented. And, perhaps most importantly, read more than one story. One novel can give us a perspective. A collection of novels can show us a conversation. That conversation is where our understanding becomes richer. Stories are not the whole truth. But they are part of the truth.

I don’t actually think the question is whether fiction is better than nonfiction. They do different jobs. Nonfiction gives us evidence. Fiction gives us perspective. Nonfiction can tell us what happened. Fiction can help us imagine what it was like to be there. Nonfiction can establish facts. Fiction can make those facts emotionally meaningful. Nonfiction can preserve testimony. Fiction can carry that testimony into the imagination of someone who might otherwise never encounter it. And when fiction is done well, it can make it impossible to look at an issue as merely an issue.

There are no issues in Our Cut of Salt. There is a family and a house. There is a grandmother who lost her childhood. There is a mother shaped by that loss. There is a granddaughter trying to understand what happened before she was born. There are people who lost homes, and there are people who inherited the consequences.

In City of Widows, there isn’t simply a discussion about women’s rights in Afghanistan. There are women trying to survive. There are mothers and daughters, soldiers and journalists. There are women building a community in a place where the larger society has denied them autonomy. That is the power of fiction. It gives a human face to something we might otherwise keep at a comfortable intellectual distance.

When I wrote about Ruins, I ended up thinking about future archaeologists trying to reconstruct our civilization from whatever evidence survives. What would they misunderstand? What would disappear? Whose voices would be missing? I find myself asking those questions again now. What stories are we leaving behind? What will future generations know about the people who lived through our wars? What will they know about refugees? What will they know about women living under oppressive governments? What will they know about Palestinians? What will they know about Afghans? What will they know about Americans? And perhaps most importantly: Who will have been allowed to tell those stories?

We cannot control everything that survives. But writers can control what they contribute. Readers can control what they choose to read and recommend. Publishers can control whose voices they give a platform. Teachers can control which stories they put in front of their students. And all of us, in small ways, participate in deciding which stories continue circulating. That is why fiction matters. Not because fiction is more truthful than nonfiction, and not because emotions are more important than facts. But because human beings do not build their understanding of the world from facts alone. We build it from stories.

The stories we tell ourselves eventually become the stories we tell about ourselves. Those stories become history. So when we write fiction about the world we live in, we aren’t only telling stories about the present. We are leaving behind evidence of how the present felt. We are giving future generations another way to understand us. And perhaps, if we tell enough different stories, we can make sure that they inherit something more complicated—and more truthful—than the official version.

What stories have changed the way you understand a social or historical issue? Have you ever read a novel that made you understand something in a way that a nonfiction account couldn’t? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

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Now that Jack has been forced to reflect on everything he has to lose, he resolves to do better. He’s determined to spend more time at home with his family and repair the relationships that have suffered over the years while he’s been so focused on work. But as Callie’s behavior becomes increasingly bizarre, Jack realizes he has a lot more room to improve than he realized – and it might be too late to save his daughter after all.

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